Kudos to Jonathan Farrington for his comments in today’s blog post. I am passionate about the fundamental role maintaining customer relationships plays in today’s growth strategy. Your business cannot grow without a intense commitment to your existing customer relationships. Or, as Farrington succinctly articulates in his post, “organizations who ignore their existing customers, whilst pursuing exciting new opportunities, are doomed to failure.”
Today’s business climate features an unbalanced obsession with the acquisition of new business while simultaneously undervaluing the investment required to sustain and maintain existing business. In an earlier post, I refer to the frustrations associated with continually “educating business owners on the financial benefits of investing in maintaining and improving customer relationships as opposed to investing in salespeople to find and acquire new ones.” Without the stability of your existing customer base and the knowledge of the value of that relationship from the perspective of your customers, your business cannot effectively sustain or achieve real growth. Net growth cannot be achieved without superb customer retention. And, new customers cannot be efficiently brought into the organization without a clear understanding of why your existing customers bought and stay.
The bottom line is that “as businesses continue to drive their sales teams to bring new customers into the organization, they need to be mindful that revenue growth also involves the effective maintaining of their existing customer relationships.” This quote, taken from another post, is a reminder to everyone that your businesses need to value and cherish the relationships they currently have more than the ones they desire. The trick is to get close to your customers, show them you really care, and discover what makes them value their relationship with you. From there it is a matter of education and execution to find equally valuable new relationships without jeopardizing the ones you already have.